"Five months after release of X11R7.0, the modularized and autotooled release of the MIT Licensed X Window System source code, the X.Org Foundation has issued its first modular roll-up release. X11R7.1 supports Linux, Solaris, and BSD systems. It includes important new server and driver features for embedded systems, 64 bit platforms, enhanced operating system support, and accelerated indirect GLX support. It most importantly demonstrates to developers and industry immediate benefits of modularization."

that's nice. now can you use that to build an x.org rpm set to distribute to multiple clients? or, as in our case, using a homebrewed installation set that builds your binaries that has your source dir in AFS, you object dir on the local drive, and the destdir again in a seperate AFS space, to then get export out to multiple clients?

the "don't try to build this by hand" is not the answer that package maintainers for a distro want to hear.

I took a look at the script, it looks pretty good for single machine installs, and with some tweaking could be useful to me. just don't try to say this is somehow easier than the old method that didn't require such jumping through hoops...

now can you use that to build an x.org rpm set to distribute to multiple clients?

Of course. That's not the package management I chose, but yes, I could do that without any problem.

or, as in our case, using a homebrewed installation set that builds your binaries that has your source dir in AFS, you object dir on the local drive, and the destdir again in a seperate AFS space, to then get export out to multiple clients?

Without a problem. I wonder what is your point, as it is easier to do that now that everything has been autotooled.
I wouldn't even have tried that before. Well, there was lndir, but I had so much strange problem with the binaries if I interrupted the compile and restarted it, that I always erased the lndir directory as soon as the compilation borked, and restarted everything.
I can even cross-compile now, while before, cross-compiling was not working for all elements (last time I tried was with XFree).

the "don't try to build this by hand" is not the answer that package maintainers for a distro want to hear

Why ?
You shouldn't use their build script as a package maintainer. You lose all the control then.

I took a look at the script, it looks pretty good for single machine installs, and with some tweaking could be useful to me. just don't try to say this is somehow easier than the old method that didn't require such jumping through hoops...

I didn't use this script. It offered no improvement to me over the old method.